Some months back I mentioned here that I had had started to use the phrase The Holodeck is other people, to help keep things focused on the human and social aspects of shared virtual/augmented reality, rather than just the technical aspects.
I used that phrase again in a talk I gave yesterday. One of the attendees sent me an email today asking, quite reasonably, whether I was consciously doing a shout-out to Sartre, and if so, in what sense I meant it.
In fact I was indeed echoing Sartre. In his play No Exit, one of the character says that “L’Enfer, c’est les autres.” This line is usually translated into English as “Hell is other people.”
In the play, this character perceives the others as Hell because they are all, in fact, in Hell, and their punishment is simply to spend eternity with each other. Of course, they are in Hell only because they make it Hell for each other. If they had been different sorts of people, the same fate might have seemed like Heaven. Quelle ironie!
But it is important not to miss Sartre’s larger point. As he himself has said, when explaining this line of dialog:
When we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters.
As we start to enter virtual worlds together, this powerful interweaving between self and other must not be ignored. In my email reply I said the following:
We define ourselves through the mirror of the view others have of us. So VR/AR will only be truly meaningful when it becomes part of this ongoing exchange of reflected selves that allows us to have a shared humanity.